Versioning in Cyber-physical Production System Engineering -- Best-Practice and Research Agenda

The parallel engineering of cyber-physical production systems (CPPSs), an important type of sCPS, needs the collaboration of several engineering disciplines, which use a wide range of heterogeneous tools and data sources. Systems engineers and process participants need an overview on the engineering artifact versions and their relationships on the project level. Unfortunately, the version management of engineering artifacts typically is conducted on the file level and does not support the versioning of engineering model elements. Recently, the Automation ML standard has been introduced to facilitate the data exchange between systems engineering tools. In this paper, we discuss the challenges of versioning related model views during the engineering of CPPSs to achieve a mechatronic view on the engineering artifacts. Based on real-world examples, we discuss (a) the strengths and limitations of best-practice approaches in CPPS engineering and (b) how software engineering contributions can provide the foundation for effectively addressing the challenge of versioning engineering model elements to provide a mechatronic view. From this analysis, we derive research issues for future work.